Author: Om Malik

The last few weeks have been dominated by speculation over two things: the Google Phone and the Apple tablet. One is now a reality. The other is still a myth. And beyond this twin-headed meme, attention has been paid to little else. Forgotten is the fact that BlackBerry is still outselling its rivals and its brand-new 9700 Bold (with touchpad) is arguably the best device the Canadian company has ever made. Also forgotten in the Google vs. Apple battle is a little company called Palm.

Yesterday, I stopped using my Nexus One and resumed using my BlackBerry Bold. (Which explains why I’m once again returning emails and text messages in a timely manner.) I also looked again at the Palm Pre, which had been sitting at the bottom of the drawer, gathering dust. I couldn’t remember exactly why I had stopped using it — though it helped that AT&T’s mobile chief, Ralph de la Vega, today confirmed that Ma Bell was going to start selling the Pre and its younger brother, the Pixi, in 2010.

Verizon is going to start supporting the Pre as well. With Sprint already in the bag, it seems like Palm finally has the ability to address a big enough market. Of course, it also means the company can no longer claim it doesn’t have enough carrier partners. Helping it get to this point was the fact Palm’s main investor, Elevation Partners, has kept the faith.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Elevation co-founder Fred Anderson called its investment in the company a “marathon,” and said his firm “hasn’t taken money off the table because we see a huge market opportunity here.” Elevation has invested a total of $460 million in Palm since 2007 and has seen the stock grow threefold in 2009 alone. I admire these guys for keeping the faith.

After coming off my 10-day Nexus One stint, I realized that barring the iPhone OS, webOS, which powers Palm’s devices, is perhaps the most complete and polished operating environment available. It’s also far more elegant and seamless than either Nokia’s Maemo or Google’s Android. I guess that’s one of the reasons why there’s ongoing speculation that someone — Dell, Nokia or Microsoft — will buy Palm.

Maybe — and maybe not! In the meantime, the big question is: Can the company stage a comeback? I have not been shy about my feelings as to Palm’s increasing irrelevance, antagonizing Palm fans in the process. There were four basic challenges that were facing the company, in my opinion:

1. A weak brand.

2. A weak balance sheet.

3. Deep-pocketed competitors, including one with a massive customer base.

4. Being late to the market, thus giving it a weak app store.

What I liked about Palm:

1. Its developer community.

2. webOS.

3. Vertical integration of its hardware and software à la Apple.

Palm has had to face the challenges I outlined last year and has continued to struggle. And should the Palm fanboys get upset by that assessment, here is the company’s latest quarterly performance: In the second quarter of its fiscal 2010 period, the company shipped 787,000 smartphones, in line with what Wall Street was expecting — and down 5 percent from what it shipped during the first quarter of fiscal 2010. Which means that five months after it was launched, the Pre is already beginning to lose steam. And don’t forget that also during that fiscal 2010 second quarter, the company put the ultra-cheap Pixi on the market.

That’s why I still think the odds are against Palm. Still, I would give the company a one-in-five chance of being relevant in two years — as long as it does three things:

First, it needs to make its hardware less complex. It took playing around with the Pre again to remember why I had hated the device in the first place. While the team had done a good job of coming out with an attractive product — Droid makes it look like a work of art — the device’s user experience was stuck in a previous era, as evidenced by the multiple input options (keyboard/touch) and multiple buttons. So in fact, what I hated was Palm’s Handspring legacy. What the company needs to do is go back to the drawing board and come out with a simpler touchphone: no keyboards, no buttons, nothing.

Second, it needs to get its app ecosystem going. The single biggest asset Palm has is webOS. As such, it needs to drive home its web-friendliness amongst developers. And in order to do that, all Palm has to do is look at its past — it had developers and apps long before apps were the new black. It needs to get the number of apps up from its woeful 800 to a more respectable number — say, 10,000. It should start by looking at the top 1,000 apps on the iPhone App Store and get them onto webOS. And if it means actually paying developers to keep supporting the platform, so be it. The good news is that the company knows this. Investor Anderson told Bloomberg: “We have to establish a very strong developer ecosystem…a critical mass of very high-quality third-party applications.”

Third, it needs to get over its Apple complex. CEO Jon Rubenstein and other Apple alums who walk the hallways of Palm need to get over their fixation with Apple and Steve Jobs. You guys are not Steve and your company isn’t Apple. What you are is Palm, a once-iconic PDA maker with decent developer support and a brand that is as hip as Fred Perry. The good news is that Fred Perry is hot again. And seriously guys, stop taking media relationship tips from Apple. It is virtually impossible to even get anyone from your company on the phone anymore, including your CEO. That elusiveness doesn’t work for a company that’s having a tough time getting market traction, doesn’t have the story or the products. You needs to get the media on your side, which means talking to the folks who live and breathe this smartphone stuff.

These tips aside, the company needs to show more urgency or it will continue to lose relevance in this high-stakes war.

Related posts:

Palm Should Go All In With Its Pre Marketing

Palm to Developers: We Love You, We Want You.

Spring in feature photo image courtesy image courtesy of Flickr user oskay.

Amazon today announced that it will start selling a global wireless version of Kindle DX (the 9.7-inch display version) in more than 100 countries for about $489 a pop starting Jan. 19. Just like the Kindle global edition, Amazon is using GSM technologies — GPRS, EDGE and 3G — to power its global WhisperNet, which allows you to download books for free.

It’s a smart move, especially for those of us who travel internationally a lot and sometimes want to buy a book on the spur of the moment. What do you guys think? Time for me to upgrade from my first edition Kindle?

(Related reports from GigaOM Pro: Evolution of the e-Book Market & How Barnes & Noble Can Avoid Getting Netflixed.)

Let’s face it, when it comes to the Nexus One, aka the Google Phone, there’s really only one thing you want to know: Is it better than the iPhone? The answer, unfortunately, is not all that simple. But after using the device for nearly 10 days, I am convinced that this new phone is the best Android device made to date.

Rather than doing a typical review of its features -– frankly all that stuff has been blogged to death — I wanted to share with you what it’s like to live with this device, day in and day out. In other words, to tell you whether or not the Nexus One is worth the hype.

The only way to do that was to make it my primary mobile device. So I put away my BlackBerry, banished my SIM-less iPhone, and switched my personal mobile number to T-Mobile USA, the preferred carrier for the Nexus One. (AT&T’s 2G network will support the device, but not on its 3G network.) With that, I was ready. My impressions are broken down into two categories: Appearance & Features and Usability & Extensibility.

Appearance & Features: This phone is fast, thin and has a gorgeous high-quality WVGA screen. It’s made by HTC and runs Android 2.1, the latest version of the OS. The 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor makes it as fast as the Droid, and it has a 5-megapixel camera (both still and video). It has the ability to add up to 8 GB of storage via a Micro SD card, which makes it a great device for taking photographs, shooting quick videos and listening to music.

What the web is saying:
ZDNET.com: Nexus One has some neat features — animated wallpapers, neat weather widgets and other items — but do those items qualify as “super.” Perhaps the Nexus One is just a “really smartphone.”
CNET News: Of course, the Google store-only purchase model marks a change in how cell phones are sold in this country. More devices will be added to the Google Store. The store will also expand to more countries and more carriers, including Verizon, which will join the program. What’s more, Verizon will sell a CDMA version of the Nexus One in the future.
Mobile Gazette: For some reason, the Google Nexus One seems to be a big deal with the media. The fact is that the phone itself is just an evolutionary upgrade to existing HTC phones, with another evolutionary upgrade to the software. From the point of view of the actual device itself, the Nexus One is hardly a revolution.
O’Reilly Radar: We’re moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.
The Globe and Mail: Instead of revolutionizing the market for handsets, as Google has done to other markets such as online web searches and online advertising, the introduction of the so-called “Googlephone” simply seems a way for Google to cement its role in web searches on mobile devices. Wall Street, consequently, has been relatively indifferent to both rumours and realities of the phone.

From a purely design standpoint, the Nexus One is within striking distance of its primary rival, the iPhone. Just as Infiniti and Lexus are almost as good as Mercedes, based on sheer looks, the Nexus One is a lot closer to the iPhone than all other Android phones. While it isn’t as iconic as the Apple device, it is a well-designed, feature-rich product that stands apart in a sea of Android handsets.

Usability & Extensibility: Looks, they say, aren’t everything. And they’re right. If anyone has ambitions to beat the iPhone, then they need to bring their A-game, emphasizing ease-of-use and seamlessness when it comes to the user experience and from a software standpoint, simplicity. Here the Google Phone misses the mark.

First, let’s focus on the things the Nexus One gets right: Connectivity is easy to achieve, including for both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections. The Wi-Fi finder in particular is pretty simple — much as it is on previous generations of Android phones. The first time you access the phone, it asks if you have a Google account. If you do, just enter the information and it painlessly syncs everything — calendar, contacts, Gmail and GTalk. If you have a Google Voice account, the device gives you an option to call out using your Google Voice number. Other Google apps — such as Google Maps — are perfectly integrated with the OS.

This integration made my life easier as our entire company’s operations are based on Google apps. The browser, too, is rock-solid.

But that’s where the seamlessness ends. Android, including the new 2.1 version, isn’t as smooth as the iPhone. One needs to make more of an effort on the Google Phone to get things done. I guess you can blame that on the lack of multitouch features. Now don’t get me wrong — Android 2.1 running on Nexus One is pretty darn good. Just not as good as an iPhone.

It feels somehow disjointed  – much like all the other Android phones. When you install non-Google applications, they don’t quite have the tight integration of Google-based apps. Of course, that’s the downside of an open platform, one not entirely controlled by a single entity. Google might have to make this issue a top priority in the coming months, something I discussed with Google’s head honcho of mobile, Andy Rubin.

I think of extensibility in terms of applications. Platforms are successful if, and only if, people build on them. Such building is one of the reasons that the iPhone has been so successful. The kludgy Android Market and its wares are Google’s Achilles’ heel, in my opinion. The company needs to fix that. I downloaded some of my favorite apps, such as FourSquare and Seesmic, for the Google phone, but not anywhere close to the number of useful apps that I run on my iPhone/iPod touch. Unless Google spends a whole lot of money and effort improving its app store, it will continue to lag its main rival.

What really doesn’t work for me: I’ve had a tough time mastering the phone part of the device. It’s just not as smooth an experience as it should be.

Moreover, the touch-based typing on Nexus One has been hard to master. I keep sending half-finished text messages. My emails are full of mistakes and I can feel my ineptness at typing on the Nexus One every single minute. And I don’t mind touchscreens. I have, on occasion, typed out entire posts on the iPhone using the WordPress app. Nexus One made me yearn for my BlackBerry Bold 9700. (Indeed, I’m back to the Bold as of this morning.)

What Surprised Me: There are two things about the Nexus One that took me by surprise. First, it has only three points of distraction — one less than the iPhone: the on-off switch, the volume slider and the rollerball. Second, the device has remarkable battery life. It lasts almost a full day even with brightness at the maximum level, Wi-Fi and 3G turned on, and high talk time — roughly 1.5 hours.

Bottom Line: If there was no such thing as an iPhone, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that the Nexus One is the best touchscreen smartphone available. It certainly is the best Android device on the market, hands down. But compared to the iPhone, it’s not as smooth or effortless to use. Perhaps in time it will be.

And at $530 a pop, the Nexus One is expensive. Plus, it’s married to a frail 3G network. T-Mobile USA has been rolling out its high-speed network across the country, but in San Francisco, the performance was lukewarm at best. If you can overlook these problems, and if you don’t like the iPhone, then this is the smartphone for you. I’m giving it a solid 7.5 out of 10.

Andy Rubin’s business card identifies him as the Vice President of Engineering at Google. In reality, he’s the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine’s mobile chief. From the time Google snapped up his tiny startup, Android, to today, when it officially launched the first Google Phone, Rubin (and his partner Rich Miner) have been behind virtually every mobile move made by the company.

And until very recently, Rubin had maintained that Google wasn’t going to make a Google Phone. So when news of the Nexus One first broke, I was flabbergasted that after all the denials it was actually doing so. To that end, I asked him: How is Google suddenly in the hardware business?

“Google isn’t building hardware,” Rubin said. He noted how Apple’s iPhone typically carries the tag “Designed in California,” which explicitly points to that company’s hardware roots. Not so with Google. “We are not designers and there are no hardware or industrial designers on my team,” said Rubin. Instead they leave it to companies such as HTC, which has made the Nexus One.

More Google Phones to Come

“For the first time, we’re issuing purchasing orders to the manufacturers so we are now their customers,” he added, “which means we can now have more influence on the device.” That influence is quite visible in the Nexus One, as I point out in my review. And Rubin said Google is working with manufacturers in addition to HTC that also want to benefit from the sales push on Google’s web site.

Those words won’t placate some of the company’s partners, which according to my sources are livid at Google’s decision to promote the HTC-built device, which works with T-Mobile USA’s 3G network. Motorola and Verizon , which have collectively spent close to $100 million promoting the Android-based Droid, are said to be particularly miffed at this decision to launch the Google Phone. One look at the Nexus One and no one in their right mind would even consider the Droid. More importantly, imagine competing with the company that makes the OS itself.

“People shouldn’t focus too much on the device (Nexus One),” said Rubin. “What’s more important is the strategy behind the devices.” Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, Google is simply “going straight to the Google customers,” he said. He believes that such a strategy could fundamentally change the way people buy cell phones — in other words, over the web. Already, as he pointed out, people are buying devices (and gadgets) online.

The way I see it, Google has a couple of major problems: It’s facing a splintering of the Android experience, thanks to the growing number of user experience efforts such as HTC’s Sense. And in order to quickly get traction in the marketplace, Google needs to attract more developers. To overcome these challenges, the company needs to seed the market with what it feels is the device that best showcases Android’s capabilities.

150,000 True Fans

Rubin hopes his company can sell, at the very least, 150,000 Nexus One devices. Why? “Because if there are that many devices out there, you are likely to run into someone with a device somewhere,” he reasoned. To be clear, that number is only applicable to the U.S., even though the device will be available in the UK, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Google won’t have any trouble selling that many devices. There are more than enough fanatical users of the company’s services, such as Gmail and Google Maps, to make that happen. The Nexus One and subsequent Google Phones will continue to be tightly integrated with Google’s services.

Cell Phone As a Platform

When I asked Rubin about some of the shortcomings of the Nexus One and of the Android platform in general, he was candid in admitting that there was still work to be done. “We could have easily seeded the developers with this new device with a higher-resolution screen, but we decided to wait till the announcement was made,” he said. Now that the device has been launched, Google, he said, was looking to aggressively woo developers. Expect it to make some major announcements on that front soon.

The world has changed, Rubin argued. Up until now, the software inside the phone and the web were two different entities living in two different worlds. What Android represents is the ethos of the web brought to the cell phone world. “As a company we iterate a lot and now you have a cell-phone platform that you can quickly iterate upon,” said Rubin. “When were you able to do that on Symbian?” Ouch! (Related: Symbian Executive Rips Into Google’s Android.)

I think that’s what makes Android such as interesting platform, as I explained in my essay, The Androidification of Everything. When I asked Rubin where Android could show up next, he said it could be anywhere — from set-top boxes to large-screen devices, even desktop PCs.

Related Research: Google’s Mobile Strategy

Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile app analytics company that recently merged with Pinch Media of New York, has teamed up with comScore in a deal that will marry Flurry’s analytics with comScore’s mobile panel data. The combined results, in turn, will be sold to comScore’s clients.

The way I see it, it’s only a matter of time before someone like comScore or The Nielsen Co. buys out Flurry and its rivals. It’s becoming increasingly evident that the mobile web and mobile apps are part of new usage behavior that goes beyond today’s plain-vanilla web.

Jack Dorsey’s Square, Incase, Verifone and now Mophie — these companies’ credit card readers are turning the iPhone/iPod touch platform into an e-commerce engine.

Mophie, a Los Angeles-based company that makes accessories for the iPod/iPhone devices will release a credit card reader at CES in January 2010. The device is going to have a reader and a software that would allow small businesses to take credit cards. No more details are available just yet.

I, for one, would like to see Mophie or one of these other startups come up with a way for me to scan my own credit card to enter it into an app or web site. Even better, I’d love it if they married their hardware with the functionality of something like 1Password. In doing so, they could enable e-commerce via the iPhone apps. Think of it as iEconomy.

I know, I know — it’s easier said than done, considering it would need some deep, system-level mucking around, and Apple isn’t going to let that happen. But it should! By opening up, it would make the iPhone into an even more useful platform.  While I can understand Apple’s hesitation at opening up the iPhone, it can start with iPod touch, which is not tethered to a wireless phone company’s network.

By focusing on the consumers, these companies can also overcome two things: somewhat finite number of likely small business customers and get scale, which would allow them to get cheaper. And this would also help them overcome the slower adoption rates normally encountered when chasing the small business market. In fact, companies such as Visa, MasterCard and large banks should be trying hard to figure out how they can put these kind of readers in the hands of both merchants and consumers, thus shifting even more transactions into the electronic realm.

OK, you can see I am just way too excited about this stuff. Why not? I am encouraged to see such experimentation. It ties in with my big belief: the marriage of computing and connectivity without the shackles of being tethered to a location is the the biggest disruptive force of our times, and it will redefine business models for decades.

For a long time, companies like Symbol Technologies, a division of Motorola, have been making point-of-sale and handheld computing devices for non-office environments such as retail locations and warehouses. It is becoming obvious by the day — they are amongst those being disrupted.

I am looking forward to more Mophies and Squares!

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

A few days ago, Antonio Rodriguez, a Boston-based entrepreneur and founder of Tabblo, emailed to let me know that he was leaving Hewlett-Packard to go do something new. Rodriguez sold Tabblo to HP in 2007 and had been working on some cool stuff at HP, but now he’s decided that it’s time for him to head back to the startup ecosystem. We met when he was trying to get traction for Tabblo, but we have stayed in touch since, musing over the future of devices and user experiences. (Antonio chronicles many of his thoughts over on his blog.)

When I asked him what he would do next, he said that, while he is “definitely headed back into the startup ecosystem,” he was shy on details as he doesn’t have “a very specific plan yet.” Of course, he wants to help entrepreneurs in the Boston area, but most importantly, he’s “really keen to get back to the intersection of what is good about the consumer Internet and the physical world of products and services that consumers actually pay for directly.”

“I am equally excited by a couple of the opportunities I’ve been exposed to through the course of the “Androidification” of some of the products I oversaw this last year as the consumer CTO for VJ’s business,” he wrote in an email. (VJ is Vyomesh Joshi, VP of HP’s Imaging & Printing Group.) “Given how you know I think devices like the [iPod] touch represent the next wave in personal computing, you can imagine there is fertile ground here.”

Rodriguez is onto something. While a lot has been made of Google’s Chrome OS and its disruptive potential, it is becoming clear the adaptability of the Android operating system is what makes it more disruptive than its shiner smartbook-oriented cousin Chrome. Android’s versatility is going to be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), scheduled to be held in Las Vegas in January 2010.

Here is a list of some of the products that indicate that Android is quickly evolving from just a mobile OS to an OS for connected devices:

• Some analysts believe that Nokia might launch an ARM-based netbook running Android in 2010.
• Archos has launched a portable Internet tablet that uses Android.
• Spring Design is going to launch Alex, an Android-based dual-screen e-book reader at CES.
• MIPS Technologies will be showcasing first Android set-top box at CES.
• ArcherMind of Nanjing, China, has produced an Android-based car navigation system.
• Many Japanese consumer electronics companies are pushing Android into new devices using it primarily as an embedded OS.

The bigger indicator of momentum for Android is the excitement it has generated in the semiconductor industry. EETimes reports that, in addition to chip companies ARM and MIPS, semiconductor design firms such as Aricent and Mentor Graphics have established special Android-focused businesses. Freescale Semiconductor is working on an Android-based netbook design, as is Qualcomm.

“As we continue to push Android into a broad range of consumer electronic products, we are building a complete partner infrastructure to offer a total MIPS-based Android solution to designers of next-generation connected devices,” Art Swift, vice president of marketing for MIPS Technologies recently told EE Times Europe. Even Asian wholesale manufacturers have started to play around with Android, which means it is only a matter of time before it starts showing up in dozens of CE devices.

Here is where folks like Rodriguez can play a big part: take the expertise of wholesale hardware manufacturers, a standard Android OS, and add their own software expertise to build something unique and useful.

What makes Android interesting for all these people? Here is what I said last year:

It’s not just an operating system, but comes with middleware and key applications, making it a complete environment that can be modified for other users. It has a robust web browser (based on WebKit), the ability to handle 2-D and 3-D graphics, and is able to read all sorts of audio, video and image files. As a result it can be extended into any number of consumer electronic devices that needed a robust software system.

A year later, I would add three more features that make Android attractive: ability to connect to wireless networks; option to use touch interfaces; and, most importantly, ease with which applications can be written for this platform. Think of it as a platform for mass customization!

With an increasing number of companies launching mobile app stores, we decided it was time to compare them. We wanted to find out the average cost of a paid application on various stores.

We asked our friends at Mobclix, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that offers mobile analytics and runs a mobile ad exchange, if they could help. They crunched some numbers and came back with some surprising findings. For example: BlackBerry paid apps are among the most expensive, followed by Microsoft, Android and the iPhone OS platform. Nokia Ovi paid apps were among the cheapest.

Data source: Mobclix

• Includes only the top 8,500 apps in the U.S. Android store.

** Includes only the top Ovi apps.

Cablevision, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator, has quietly soft-launched a new automated sign-in process that allows its customers to log into its Wi-Fi cloud that covers many busy Long Island and New York City venues such as Madison Square Gardens, Radio City Music Hall and Long Island MacArthur Airport. Such features are dramatically changing broadband usage behavior. Cablevision launched the Optimum Wi-Fi network in September 2008, and it’s going to cost a total of $300 million to build out.

The automatic sign-in feature allows customers to automatically sign onto the Optimum Wi-Fi cloud whenever the network is within range of a Wi-Fi device. The sign-in process eliminates the need to enter a user ID and passwords. Cablevision developed this feature in-house, and it’s currently available on laptops, Apple’s iPod touch, the iPhone and BlackBerry devices. The automated sign-in has boosted usage of the service: Average weekly sessions have gone up from around 200,000 in early November 2009 to more than 300,000 per week on average today.

Here are some interesting facts about Cablevision’s Optimum Wi-Fi network:

• It averages 300,000 sessions per week.
• Cablevision customers average more than 4 million minutes a day online over Optimum Wi-Fi.

The growing usage of Cablevision’s Wi-Fi cloud is yet more proof that Wi-Fi can become a critical part of the wireless broadband infrastructure. Reports show that increased sales of smartphones are boosting Wi-Fi hotspot use.

Handhelds accounted for 35 percent of all hotspot connections in 2009, up from 20 percent in 2008, according to In-Stat, a research firm. AT&T has been having a lot of trouble with its 3G network, and it makes perfect for it to do a deal with Cablevision, where iPhone users automatically switch to the Cablevision Wi-Fi network.

A month ago, I reported that Motorola and Verizon were on track to sell a million Droids in the fourth quarter of 2009. Not only are they closer to that milestone, but it seems Droid is also the most dominant Android phone on the market today.

Even though the overall Android app market grew 20 percent month-over-month in December 2009, Droid logged the biggest gains, indicating a higher number of Droids in the market than competing Android devices, new data from Flurry Media, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company, shows:

• Droid application downloads increased by 93 percent over previous Fridays in December.
• Droid accounted for 48 percent of download volume across the leading Android handsets (Droid, myTouch 3G, G1 and HTC Hero).

In October, HTC Dream was the best-selling Android smartphone, a position it retained during November, but things have started to change. When Droid was released in November, some analysts expected Motorola to sell about 600,000 units during the fourth quarter, but those estimates were quickly revised thanks to a $100 million marketing push by both Motorola and Verizon. In December, it seems Droid has taken a very strong lead among its Android brethren.

Apple, it seems, had a very nice Christmas — thanks to booming sales of its iPod touch. Apple’s App Store saw a a sharp spike in downloads during the month of December, according to results of a study conducted by Flurry Media, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. In 2008, when Apple’s App Store saw similar spikes during the holiday season, the company later reported strong sales of its two flagship products, the iPhone and iPod touch.

The iPod touch, in particular, seems to be enjoying strong sales this year. According to Amazon.com, the 8GB version of the iPhone was one of the best-selling devices during the 2009 holiday season and “Amazon customers bought enough 8GB iPod touches to play 442 years of continuous music.” Flurry’s data offers more anecdotal information about the hotness of the iPod touch.

• App downloads on the iPod touch soared past the iPhone for the first time.
• iPod touch 3G downloads increased by more than 900 percent on Christmas Day vs. the average of all previous Fridays in December.
• Total iPod touch downloads (all generations) jumped by over 1,000 percent on Christmas Day.
• iTunes gift card giving may have driven downloads to older-generation iPod touch devices.

The strong sales of the iPod touch reaffirm my longstanding belief that it’s a critical weapon in Apple’s battle against its smartphone rivals including Google. Here are some of our previous posts that you might enjoy:

• All Hail the iPod Touch
• Is the iPod Touch a Bigger Game Changer Than the iPhone?
• Is iPhone the New Gaming Platform?
• With iPod Touch (& iPhone) Apple Will Rule the Mobile Web